Sacred Images and Art: Sacred Images and Art Online

The Metropolitan Museum of Art creates, organizes, and disseminates a broad range of digital images and data that document the rich history of the Museum, its collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities.

You are welcome to use images of artworks in The Met's collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain, or those to which the Museum waives any copyright it might have, for any purpose, including commercial and noncommercial use, free of charge and without requiring permission from the Museum. Just check the "Public Domain Artworks" box when searching.

Several databases allow you to find the Louvre's artworks and more in a single click. Atlas, an English language database, catalogs the 30,000+ items in the Lourve's collections.

Click the menu icon on the left side of the screen to browse genres, media, etc. Click Explore to view the collection and narrow your results using limiters. You may download images for non-profit personal or academic use.

Click "Search the Collection" to locate a specific artwork, or browse by artists, subjects, or styles.

To download images, you will need to create a Rijksstudio account.

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use.

NGA Online Editions presents the most current, in-depth information on the Gallery’s collections by the world’s leading art historians along with rich capabilities for exploring that information. A customized reading environment and toolkit for managing text and images are intended both to provide scholars with a useful workspace for research and to encourage the study and appreciation of art.

A user's guide to NGA Online Editions.

Hosted by Princeton University, this collection includes images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. Although the Index of Medieval Art was formerly known as the Index of Christian Art, it now includes secular subjects as well as a growing number of subjects from medieval Jewish and Muslim cultures.

The Web Gallery of Art is a searchable database of European fine arts and architecture (8th-19th centuries), currently containing over 42.400 reproductions. Artist biographies, commentaries, guided tours, period music, catalogue, free postcard and mobile services are provided.

View artworks from the collections of the various Vatican Museums. There is an online library catalog available in Italian only.

The Copyright notice on the Vatican Museum web pages prohibits the reproduction and distribution of any images from their collections. Images can be used for non-profit personal or academic use. Images are available for printing, not downloading.

Under “usage rights” choose what you plan to do (either “free to share or use” or “free to share or use or modify”)